The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
Zero’s Gate
New fiction by Larry L. Dill
So I was going to be in New York anyway so I decided to make the best of it. My daughter and her husband lived there and were what I had once called “Whole Foods Republicans.” They were not amused. But I love my daughter very much. She has the kind of idealism that is as much apart of our family as our DNA.
So we went to a lot of bars and vegan friendly restaurants just the two of us and with her husband and the assorted “hangers-on,” as I call them, who hung out with them on the weekends. Really it was just their friends. What they called friends were to me just people they knew. You could walk into a bar in New York City, just about any bar, just about any time of any day and meet somebody you had more in common with than the people who make up your circle of friends. That’s what it looked like to me.
So we were in a bar at one of these “friends meetings” and there was Clara. Clara was a “hottie” as I’d been forewarned. Thirty years old, she seemed forty to me. In the positive way that only a 65 year old man could appreciate. She had the kind of beauty you knew would be with her for the rest of her life. Even without her hair her beauty would still be there. She insisted on calling me Mr. and Sir. I chided her about it. She smiled slyly as if to pretend to have no idea why it would make any difference to me. We talked about poetry and I read my latest poem to her, scribbled in a notebook I carried in my pocket (dedicated, as it happened, to my youngest daughter who had just turned 30 herself). But Clara was 40 I kept pretending. And so I still had a chance. There was her husband over there looking like Ben Affleck. A minor obstacle in my plan. I was just gonna be a little experiment on Tuesday afternoons. Something like a continuing education class at the Y in, say, modern poetry. The kind Bukowski would teach. “Studies in the Romantic Poetry of Dirty Old Men of the Twentieth Century.”
Clara beckoned me with a finger to a quieter place in the back of the bar and away from the others and kissed me on the cheek and said, “You remind me of my grandfather.” I just looked at her. “He used to quote long passages from Dante! In Italian! And Shakespeare, too! In Italian!” I smiled, lifted her chin up to mine, and kissed her gently on the lips. Her dark eyes big as saucers, she stepped back a little, glancing over her shoulder at Affleck’s back. “You don’t waste any time,” she said. “I don’t have any time to waste,” I said.
She cleared her throat, “Well, anyway, my favorite poet is Conrad Aiken. I memorized a poem of his when I was in high school. I’ve never forgotten it.” I could not remember ever having read Conrad Aiken. But I recognized the name. “Aiken.” I said, noncommittally “Yes,” she said. “Shall I recite it for you?” Her eyes sparkled exactly the same way I had described my daughter’s eyes sparkling in the poem I’d just read to her. “By all means,” I said.
She cleared her throat again and stood very straight and square in front of me like a little girl in elementary school. It was very cold outside and she still had on her overcoat. Unbuttoned to reveal her slender little body. She no longer looked 40... or even 30. She looked 13. Standing in front of her Italian grandfather doing a recitation. She cleared her throat again and looked very serious.
“ ‘Summer’
by Conrad Aiken.
Absolute zero: the locust sings:
summer’s caught in eternity’s rings:
the rock explodes, the planet dies,
we shovel up our verities.
The razor rasps across the face
and in the glass our fleeting race
lit by infinity’s lightning wink
under the thunder tries to think.
In this frail gourd the granite pours
the timeless howls like all outdoors
the sensuous moment builds a wall
open as wind, no wall at all:
while still obedient to valves and knobs
the vascular jukebox throbs and sobs
expounding hope propounding yearning
proposing love, but never learning
or only learning at zero’s gate
like summer’s locust the final hate
formless ice on a formless plain
that was and is and comes again.”
She curtsied as if frozen in her little thirteen year old body. I didn’t know what to say or do. As if I were suddenly back there at 13 myself. We just looked at each other. “What do you think it means?” she said finally.
“You tell me,” I said. “Well… I guess it’s about the timelessness of the universe and the brevity of human life,” she said as if she had said it a thousand times before. “And ‘Absolute Zero?… Zero’s Gate’ ?” I said. “What does that mean?” She paused. Suddenly she was 40 again… 50, 65.
“That’s us!” the little 13 year old shouted. “That’s you and me! Right here. Right now. At the center of the universe! At the center of time and space!”
She threw her arms around me and I could feel the tears on her cheeks mingle with mine. Then she put her arm in mine and lead me back toward the “friends meeting” which was breaking up and people were saying their goodbyes. Affleck carefully buttoned up Clara’s coat and they were gone. My daughter looked at me with concern. “You alright?” she said. “I’m fine,” I said. What were you talking about?” she said. “Absolute Zero,” I said. “What?” she said. “Heaven.” I said.
January 2009 New Hope Journal
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copyright 2009 by Larry L. Dill